Loan words

Mandarin uses many “loan words” from English to represent new objects and concepts from the west.

The Chinese characters in most loan words represent the phonetic of the English words, the meaning of the characters are often unrelated. For example, the Chinese word for “salad”, 沙拉[shālā], consists of the character for “sand” [沙 / shā] and the character for “pulling” [拉 / lā].

Whilst most loan words are purely phonetics, Chinese people sometimes did try to show their wits in their character selection for loan words. Here are some examples: